Elmer Leopold Rice

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Rice, Elmer [Leopold] [né Reizenstein] (1892–1967), playwright. The native New Yorker studied law and began to practice before switching to the theatre. In a career that lasted more than forty years, he had more than twenty plays produced on Broadway, ranging from starkly realistic drama to comic fantasy. His earliest work leaned heavily on his experience as a lawyer, and his first drama, On Trial (1914), provided one of the most sensational first nights in theatre history. For the Defense (1919) and It Is the Law (1922) followed, as did a vehicle for Mrs. Fiske written with Hatcher Hughes, Wake Up, Jonathan! (1921). The Adding Machine (1923) was a landmark expressionistic fantasy. Close Harmony (1924), written with Dorothy Parker, was well received but failed, while his mystery Cock Robin (1928), written with Philip Barry, enjoyed a modest run. He earned a Pulitzer Prize for his unflinching slice of New York life, Street Scene (1929), but two other plays the same year, The Subway and See Naples and Die, were unsuccessful. Rice deftly probed American expatriates in Paris in The Left Bank (1931), then a month later returned to the legal world with the powerful drama Counsellor‐at‐Law. For the rest of the 1930s he wrote largely well‐intentioned propaganda pieces, which failed to please critics and playgoers: We, the People (1932), Judgment Day (1934), Between Two Worlds (1934), and American Landscape (1938). Of his later works, such as Two on an Island (1940), Flight to the West (1940), A New Life (1943), The Grand Tour (1951), Not for Children (1951), The Winner (1954), and Cue for Passion (1958), his most interesting play was Dream Girl (1945), written for his wife, Betty Field. Rice directed most of his own plays, as well as those by others, including Abe Lincoln in Illinois (1938). He served as a regional director of the Federal Theatre Project and was a founder of the Playwrights' Company. Autobiography: Minority Report, 1963.

Columbia Encyclopedia:

Elmer Leopold Rice

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Rice, Elmer, 1892-1967, American dramatist, b. New York City, LL.B. New York Law School, 1912. After the success of his first play, On Trial (1914), he turned his interests to the theater. Rice's first major contribution to the American stage was The Adding Machine (1923), an expressionistic play satirizing man in the machine age. Street Scene (1929; operatic version by Kurt Weill, 1947), one of his most compassionate works, is a realistic drama of tenement life in New York. His plays of the 1930s-including Counsellor-at-Law (1931), We, the People (1933), and Between Two Worlds (1934)-continued to express his social and political views. Although Dream Girl (1945), a romantic comedy, was a huge success, his later plays for the most part lack the power of his early works. He was also the author of novels and of essays, some of which were published as The Living Theatre (1959). During the 1930s Rice was regional director of the N.Y. Federal Theater project.

Bibliography

See his autobiography Minority Report (1963); A. F. Palmieri, Elmer Rice: A Playwright's Vision of America (1980).

(rīs) pronunciation, Elmer Leopold 1892-1967.

American playwright noted for his expressionist plays, including The Adding Machine (1923) and Street Scene (1929).


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